Absent everything else, I have to admit I find it hilarious that in four years the White House never figured out a way for the President to address the public via electronic means beyond the consumer app in his pocket.
I mean, it's a banal and boring law, but his use of Twitter was always a clear violation of the Presidential Records Act. They couldn't have set up a dumb finger server or something and written him a junky app, then mirrored it to FB/Twitter/Parler whatever?
They could have, but I presume getting a president to use something like that is tricky if he doesn't want to, and I get the impression that using Twitter (and not using it through something some backstabbing staffer could access) was very much the point for Trump.
It's far less nuanced than that. It's the "old man shouts at cloud" meme, grumpy, lazy, old man wants to communicate to the word using methods he already knows.
I suspect it's also about being visibly popular compared to other people on the platform. What good are "ratings" if you are the only person on a given rating system.
My thinking right now is that the status quo is the symptom and not the cause. Were we as the human race simply not ready for this?
Could we have been more diligent in educating people on ways of debating and understanding, could we have built a society that is not obsessed with perfection and winning?
If it wasn't Twitter, Facebook, Google etc. it would simply be something else in their place who had to perform the job of the gatekeeper. We were on course to enabling global communication at an unprecedented scale regardless of these companies establishing themselves, it wasn't news that we'd get here. Did we just discount the discourse on this that it's 'suddenly' a concern?
The people got too much of a voice and the powers that be are now reigning that back.
Decentralization, encryption and anonymity is the only way to deal with this.
Aether is a good first draft: multi part app with a back end that can live on a single board computer in your closet and costs $4 to run for a year and a front end that you can use on your phone.
I'd much rather we all man up and learn to live with the fact that people say things we disagree with on the internet, instead of assuming that we need gatekeeping.
The government are the ones inciting violence though, seems like they have made the right decision to me, he’s done things that would get any other user banned for years!
Incidentally I absolutely love it when conservatives advocate for more government, whatever happened to the market is perfect let it decide the winners and losers.
As I see it, a company can either offer a public platform for everyone to voice their oppinion, not moderate and not be responsible for what is published on its platform but let the authorities handle illegal/harmful behaviour.
Or they can choose to moderate and/or editorialize the content they host and the conversations that happen on their platform AND be held responsible for it.
I'm not saying it is bad that a company moderates their platform, please do it! But don't pretend everyone can voice their view on their platform and be clear and forward about what you are doing.
The government is one small part of the State (as an organization). I should have probably said "Let the legislative and judiciary powers of the State handle it".
>whatever happened to the market is perfect let it decide the winners and losers
This is already happening: some people, disillusioned by the service Twitter provides, are moving to Parlor, for example.
You’re stating your opinions as if they are natural laws. It would be best for everyone if Twitter stopped policing things themselves and moved to a community driven model, nothing should be deleted but if the “incites violence” (or certain others) tag is added by enough people those tweets get broadcast to nobody and you’d have to look on Trump’s or whoever’s page to see it. Yes the gaming of this system would itself have to be policed, however I think on average it would be better than what we have now.
In the end Twitter have the power to ban Trump from their platform the same way a bar owner can ban people who they don’t like. Just because everyone thinks and feels Twitter is a public forum does not make it one; it is private property like virtually everything on the Internet.
I would really like to know where the free speech activists think all of this will end if we just let the Qanon and Trump movement do whatever they want.
Without weighing in on the actual alternatives... Your comment comes off a bit weird to me because that's what bondarchuck is saying he would rather not have. Yet you present it as a new (to the discussion) option. It makes the conversation kind of go like this:
Him: I would much rather we have A so that we didn't need B
I think it’s pretty unlikely social media companies will continue to have total control over public discourse. There’s already some legal precedent that the Supreme Court views Twitter and Facebook as public squares. See Packingham v. North Carolina from 2017, for example. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see an escalation of this viewpoint soon.
You have to admit that that would be a lot easier if the people you are disagreeing with were making reasonable level-headed arguments, but somehow we are living in an era where large swaths of the population are convinced that there is no difference between what is true and what they feel is true and, consequently, they reject rationality and with it the concept of objective reality.
I know I'm on the record as saying that rationality, which is to say empirical philosophy, is incomplete. Let me clarify that by saying that it isn't the same thing as rejecting it outright anymore than rejecting Newtonian mechanics outright is the same thing as admitting it is incomplete.
Yes, large swaths of the population are wrong (from your viewpoint) and not open to rational argument and there's nothing you can do to change it, except totalitarian control of public discourse. My point is that it's vastly preferable to just let them be wrong on the internet and deal with it like an adult.
That has lead us to a point where people who, in spite of failed court cases, lack of evidence, expert opinion, and even disagreement among people who align with their political ideology, have insisted that a democratic election was stolen and believe it strongly enough to attempt to invade a government building with the expressed intent of executing politicians.
That anyone can believe that simply "letting them be wrong on the internet" is a viable course of action at this point is utterly baffling.
I sincerely hope there is an alternative to totalitarian control of public discourse, but I am becoming increasingly worried that there is not.
So when you see a political movement that wants to take your country into a dark alley you're supposed to man up and turn your cheek?
No, people will push back.
We could always go the cigarette route: Put a big sticker (legally required) in front of every twitter & facebook post/page just like cigarette boxes need a "smoking kills" sticker. Something like:
"Warning: This site contains highly speculative & offensive gossip and might cause anxiety, stress, unattainable standards and lowered self-esteem. Information on this site should not be considered credible, and might cause radicalization and extremism."
The problem is that cigarettes aren't vital to a functioning democracy, information is. When you impose limits on the spreading of information you give tools that can be abused to block valid information. Even if the 'block' is putting a label on everything, it'll still limit the spread of information.
Devil's advocate: democracy worked well (at least as well as the last ten years) before everyone could voice their oppinions in a worldwide public forum. We had journalists that spread the information through various channels.
Did it actually work well though? Because most democracies are rather young. Look at interwar Europe and how most of those democracies turned into autocracies. A longstanding democracy in history seems to be more of an exception rather than the rule. And most of those seem to come with some pretty big asterisks too. It rather seems to me that democracies today have performed better in terms of stability than in the past.
I really don't understand why you're being so hostile; I genuinely believe that it will help. It's not an all-or-nothing, every bit of progress helps.
As for your very specific example, the arguments post-graduate anti-vaxxers will make are going to be different than people who're mislead and aggravated by 600-word articles or even shorter chain messages spreading bullshit. The vaccine to this bullshit is education, believe it or not.
> Could we have been more diligent in educating people on ways of debating and understanding, could we have built a society that is not obsessed with perfection and winning?
Humans are instinctively divisive. Our species relied heavily on small communities working together and excluding other communities throughout our entire human history. Tribalism is engrained in our nature as a direct effect of our evolution. It would take another thousand years to unlearn that. Social media is a global tool, and therefore social media has just brought out the worst in humans on a global level, but it hasn't created that intrinsic tribal instinct in us to begin with. Humans are just not meant to cooperate on such a large scale. We'd all be much better off (aka leaving more harmonious) if we'd live in smaller communities and would revert a lot of what globalisation has given us.
The logic is that by banning and moderating they are taking editorial decisions which mark them out as being a "publisher" as opposed to an impartial "platform". It's a bit of a stretch.
For these big companies I think governments gave them the choice to censor or be broken up, so they chose censorship. Now the governments are wanting more regulation.
I don't know how they all are responding but could Facebook be handling this dilemma better than Twitter, or would Facebook also be under their sights? How could Amazon etc be targeted?
I'd rather fancy a system where such platforms can choose between being a publisher and a platform.
If they be a publisher, they may take editorial control but the also become liable for anything that escaped their control and can no longer claim “The views expressed here are not our own.”.
In the alternative, they can be a platform, and may not take editorial control and only be required and allowed to remove content they are legally required to remove.
The current situation is that they want their cake and eat it too.
>In the alternative they can be a platform, and may not take editorial control and only be required and allowed to remove content they are legally required to remove.
Any platform that tries to do this will quickly fill up with spam.
Just a random idea: perhaps we should extend democracy to the spreading of information. I.e. you can spread information but only if the majority of people agree with it. (A post is evaluated/moderated by a small group, then a bigger group, etc., until perhaps it reaches the entire population). Moderation is not limited to groups, so echo chambers would not have a chance.
EDIT: minorities still have a chance in two ways: (1) they can have discussion groups which can be large but still limited (2) the majority will have some tolerance and thus will only suppress the ideas of minorities if they find them objectionable.
> Having free speech tied to current moral fashions seems disastrous.
Well, the entire point is that free speech is not the same as broadcasting rights. You can still have free speech. You just don't get a "free platform".
Minorities can still have discussion groups. It's just that their ideas never achieve mass broadcasting if the majority finds those ideas objectionable.
I’m amazed how a large portion of the Internet can hold two diametrically opposed ideas in their heads like this as the same time. Really bodes well for the next decade.
“You still have freedom of speech, but can only talk about subjects I approve of”.
You are advocating censorship of "objectionable" views. Who is to judge what is and what is not "objectionable" and what can and cannot be spoken in public? This is absolutely wrong.
To do this is to revisit some of the worst days of the 20th century. I am astonished that views like this are getting more popular. Have we learned nothing from history?
In all seriousness, what do you think will be the eventual outcome when you marginalise people this way? Don't just reply to me here. Go and do some real reading.
I think we need to clear this misconception that democracy is good.
It may be the least evil form of managing societies we attempted until now, but it's in no way good.
Democracy is violently (under threat or by direct action) imposing the will of majority on a minority.
I believe we will just crash eventually, learn a lesson and try something else. Or we will all die before that. Or we will all get unlimited energy, defeat aging and become gods.
The reason I think this is because of the USA: the USA started as a minarchy, it became very rich (probably because of it) and then slowly became the largest, fattest government ever.
Similarly, tons of smaller governments in EU keep growing larger and more inefficient instead of cutting down and freeing the economy.
All modern democracies have tools in place to protect minorities. It's never as simple as a bare majority imposing its will.
Ironically, it leads to the exact opposite, where certain minorities express disproportionate power. For example, the rules always favor the status quo, so a minority in power can retain power, and subvert even largish majorities from passing rules they favor.
Democracy may well be the least worst form of government, but it's even worse than I think most people give it credit for. The assumption is that at least half the people are happy with at least half of the results, and it doesn't even guarantee that much.
In a purely democratic event, the majority will impose its will on the rest of the population (eg. think about Brexit).
I think you're conflating democracy in general with social democracies.
Social democracies are much more complicated - but they have a corruptible government which pretty much guarantees that the richest minority will be able to get laws that appear to satisfy everyone while benefiting them.
A clear example is progressive taxation - it sounds fair to a laymen. Then you see that all the rich people use tax loopholes to pay close to zero while middle class people struggle to get rich because of the extra tax hurdle.
I think the situation is slightly better in Switzerland because it's a semi-direct democracy and the greater use of referendums gives the population a greater chance to shape their society.
In times gone by, that would have prevented people spreading information about the world being a sphere and orbiting the sun. The flat earthers and proponents of the earth being the centre of the universe would have suppressed Copernicus' and Kepler's discoveries of heliocentrism and elliptical orbits.
New ideas displace old ideas all the time, and that displacement can only occur if there is both a rational evidence-based reason for displacing it and there is the opportunity to do so. To suppress an idea is to remove opportunity for discussion and to entrench the established viewpoint irrespective of its merits. It's the very antithesis of modern liberal thought.
Suppression of ideas also conversely prevents the objective discussion of bad ideas and dismissing them. Too much conversation in the present days is not grounded in objectivity, and this lets bad ideas fester. Open and fair minded discussion is a basic requirement for living in a free society.
There is a disturbing tendency to wish to suppress discussion of "sensitive" or "controversial" topics in recent years. That is a path which will lead to tyranny. Because it boils down to other people telling us what we are and are not allowed to say, think and do. This would not be a fair or free society.
I believe that what I'm suggesting is more like how spreading of information worked in the old days (increasingly bigger groups have to approve of the information). The problem is that today we have social media and false information can spread instantly to an entire population. This needs a new approach, because it creates problems like extreme polarization.
Having groups "approve" information means having gatekeepers who wield a lot of power. Censors. Who is to ensure that they exercise that power both fairly and accurately? It opens a huge can of worms. It might seem to make sense for "obviously" black and white issues. But most are not so clear cut, and choosing a "correct" side is impossible.
"False information" isn't countered by suppression. It's countered with facts and open discussion.
I absolutely agree that the current state of affairs with social media is problematic. That's the reason I quit all of them and deleted my accounts permanently. But what you're advocating still amounts to censorship and a failure to treat individuals as capable of evidence-based rational thought, and is still the antithesis of what we want in an open and free society.
In the abstract, that's how information spreads. Just look at conventional media: A small group judges something or someone newsworthy, and then the other outlets repeat it. Or, look at the old email chains that were popular before social media.
But, more importantly, people like to spread what they want to believe, even if it's not true. Trump really played into that: He started by promoting the birther theory, which people who didn't like Obama chose to believe. Finally, he promoted the theory that there was widespread election fraud, even though it was thoroughly disproven. Again, people chose to believe Trump's lie even though it was thoroughly disproven.
IMO, we need to strengthen our slander laws, and have a higher "burden of truth" on our media companies. Specifically, if a media company covers provenly false information in a way that implies it is, or could be, true, that media company needs to be prosecuted for slander, or worse.
But, more importantly, we need to prosecute elected officials who contradict fact; and ban candidates who brazenly contradict established fact.
I'm old enough to remember when the government made it illegal to mention homosexuality in schools. And when it was illegal for a particular elected MP to speak on television.
> I'm old enough to remember when the government made it illegal to mention homosexuality in schools.
Even today, there are teachers who spout that homosexuality is somehow a bad thing.
Controversial topics will take time to reach mainstream agreement, no matter how you shape the spread of information. The question is how to do it in a way such that society is not disrupted by a strong opinion.
Not quite sure what your point is - section 28 made it illegal to "promote" homosexuality, precisely to prevent it achieving mainstream acceptance. It was effectively illegal to say that it wasn't bad to be gay.
What does the "Health Secretary" have to do with tech regulation? [edit: I would think the UK Health Secretary should be pretty specifically focused on the growing health crisis at home rather than interviewing on topics outside his current role.]
In any case, regardless of who you are, if you violate the terms of service of platform, you can be terminated on that platform.
The platform makes the rules, within the context of the legal systems with which it is governed by. When it comes to "free speech", that is a very tricky subject. More significantly, if even the local population cannot agree on whether certain speech should be allowed or not, then the government has no hope of regulating it either.
> What does the "Health Secretary" have to do with tech regulation?
Nothing in terms of his day job but he is known as a fan of technology (not a particularly well-informed one) so he’s likely to have an opinion on the matter. More to the point, though, the government usually nominate a minister to go round all the Sunday morning political TV shows and answer questions on whatever is in the news.
> What does the "Health Secretary" have to do with tech regulation?
He was being interviewed on a general politics show
>> Mr Hancock, a former culture secretary, told BBC One's Andrew Marr Show
It's usual on these shows for the interviewer to treat the the politician as a representative of the wider government and to ask general questions as well as those about the politician's own area of responsibility.
The UK Cabinet traditionally operates on the principle of collective responsibility. Once a position has been adopted, it is everyone's public position and everyone is responsible for it, even if they disagreed or argued for something else in private. If you're not OK with that, you're expected to resign from the Cabinet, and from time to time people do.
A corollary of this is that when any Cabinet minister speaks publicly, they speak on behalf of the government, and they are expected to be able to respond to general media enquiries on matters outside their specific role. They may choose not to respond substantially or to refer the enquiry to a colleague more familiar with the details, and they very often do. If they don't, it is almost certain that they are expressing an agreed Cabinet position and they just happen to be the minister doing the media rounds that day.
"Step by step, private companies incorporate state businesses; even the most stubborn vestige of the old work of governing (for example, that activity which is supposed to secure private parties against other private parties) will ultimately be taken care of by private contractors..."
One the one hand, I laugh at the fools in government who make such pronouncements. The big social platforms are *Private Companies*, NOT public utilities. They can do whatever they want.
On the other hand, these platforms have amplified voices that would otherwise not even attain local coverage. Being coldly objective, they also make it possible for State Actors to punch way, way above their weight in an information warfare perspective (see Russia).
It's also very important to remember that social media and modern 24 hour WWF-style "Journalism" WOULD NOT EXIST without near constant levels of conflict content to drive engagement. So there are entire very large business domains where there is existential threat were there to be regulation of content.
Net-net, the best possible outcome of all of this would be the demise of platforms like FB, Twitter, FoxNews, CNN, BBC, et. al as they really only serve to rapidly diminish the IQ's of the electorate/culture.... Of course that won't happen because culturally we are beyond weak and have long since surrendered our future to a small group of people with the wealth to supersede most if not all Government controls (including the UK of course, I mean do you really think Boris Johnson has the stones for doing anything other than running his pie-hole like Trump has for the last 4 years??).
We shouldn't need to even be discussing the ethics of regulating statements made by those in government (or opposition).
It's due to the unbelievable amount of manipulative statements and outright lies (e.g. many of the statements made by the current UK government and the "Brexiteers" - not just Trump) that this is even an issue.
A platform labelling or blocking repeated offenders seems sensible to me - however I do think the rules they are enforcing should be fair and equally applied.
> New laws will be introduced aimed at tackling the internet “wild west” and making Britain the “safest place in the world” to be online, the culture secretary has said.
> The largest social media companies could be fined billions of pounds if they do not take steps to protect users, Matt Hancock warned.
> A new code of practice to tackle online bullying, stricter age verification requirements, and a regular internet safety transparency report to keep tabs on online abuse could also be included in new legislation.
> Measures to tackle online harm could be funded through an industry-wide levy on firms such Facebook and Twitter.
He's also a very strange man aside from that. For example, have you seen that video of him standing uncomfortably close to a lady he's being interviewed with, and staring at her? Weird as fuck.
The fundamental problem with the regulatory environment in the UK, as far as I can tell, is that both the big parties have been authoritarian on security and technology issues when in power, but neither appears to have a deep understanding of how modern technology works and the moral issues it raises. Consequently, in this field more than most, policies are set almost entirely for political expediency and appearances, rather than because they will achieve any other form of positive result.
This is how we get conflicting positions, such as "we value security and want the UK to be the safest place in the world to be online", but also "we want our police and security services to be able to access any online communications".
The handling of social media has often been similar. Apparently we are a democracy that values free speech, yet we also want the social media companies to use unspecified technology that they are assumed to have available to identify and block harmful content, for whatever definition of "harmful" is politically convenient at the time.
A recurring theme is being seen to object to negative consequences of modern technology but without ever taking a clear stance or positive action for which they could be held responsible if it has other negative consequences of its own. It's the epitome of trying to have a cake and eat it, instead dumping the hard questions on the big tech firms. Those firms make good targets politically because obviously they do have some real problems, so a lot of people will be fine with blaming them for the evils of the tech world and won't have much sympathy for anything bad that happens to them.
I really thought that HN was a place where logical arguments were supposed to be conducted NOT unsubstantiated ad-hominem attacks. I really can't believe this comment is the top-rated one.
UK government minister belatedly finds out that adopting US based companies as pseudo official channels may be a mistake. Worrisome to see how far elected officials can be out of touch with reality.
I never understood why my own government seems to feel the need to jump on every social medium out there. It gives those legacy, leverage and goes against many years of tradition.
Companies are now shielded from the government when it comes to user generated content with Section 230. They are not, however, shielded from social justice. And there lies the problem.
Social spaces and infrastructure should be regulated so that they can be shielded from social justice and the government regarding user generated content.
No one will boycott twitter if they know twitter can't just press a button to ban. No one will ask for demonetization of a YouTube channel if they know that has to come from the legal system. Or pressure companies buying ads that show on channels you don't like
Of course people will boycott twitter if the company cannot easily ban content. They will label twitter as a network that promote right wing propaganda and push people to move to other places if they don’t want to be associated with that group.
There's a very obvious fix for this which is to simply acknowledge that social media platforms are operating with too much editorial bias to avoid being considered publishers rather than platforms. This acknowledgement creates an environment where the safest strategy to maintain the legal protections that make social media platforms possible is one of minimal censorship.
Lol Govts around the world are stupidly starting to think that they have a say in how private companies can regulate users on it. Lol users don't even pay for the bulk of social media & its mostly Govts/politicians/celebs who pay PR firms to manage their 'free'/ToS attached accounts. Talk about SelfAwareWolves
I don't see what questions are raised by twitters Liberal and Permissive minimal actions that haven't been raised already by Foxx's pure propaganda model...
To what extent could the UK regulate a US company? Especially if they don’t have a UK subsidiary.
Last I checked I publish a blog site and I did not get the necessary permission from Chinese authorities to do so... and I don’t care, I have no link to China.
Extra-territorial enforcement is a different matter, though. A government on the far side of the world can say whatever it likes in its own laws, but if a business has no presence there, why would that business be under the foreign government's jurisdiction?
The EU's strategy with the GDPR, in attempting to make it viral so that businesses it could reach within its own jurisdiction could be penalised if they dealt with businesses it couldn't reach elsewhere, is a dangerous path to be following. Taken to its logical conclusion, this kind of strategy becomes a significant barrier to international trade and can leave businesses in impossible positions.
A better way to address these issues is for governments to make proper international agreements with each other on matters where they agree on the principles, so that businesses in any state that is party to those agreements know what the rules are, and the rules are consistent and enforceable throughout the states making the agreement.
Without such agreements, one would hope that governments of states that have not implemented some rule would protect their own businesses, including actively intervening to support those businesses if they were being "leaned on" to enforce the rules of other states extra-territorially. We really don't want a world where any sufficiently large political power -- the US, EU, China, India, whoever -- can unilaterally set rules that apply to everyone else as well.
Reminder to everyone especially Hancock: the US is not the UK. We don't have "section 230". We don't have US-style free speech. We have, at best, ECHR-style free speech, which comes with slightly more caveats.
And it's important to understand that's the one exception - MPs have freedom from prosecution only when they're speaking in parliament, and that freedom is moderated by the fact the house can have a majority to suspend that MP from parliament.
Fortunately, in the US, the constitution prevents the government from forcing private companies or individuals to promote/broadcast/display the messages of government leaders.
It’s a little weird he tries to characterize Twitter exercising their ability to choose who has a voice on their platform as a new thing. That’s not new. They’ve been doing this all along.
If you only promote free speech in defense of authoritarian sedition, you aren’t promoting free speech. You’re promoting authoritarian sedition.
Unfortunately, Twitter has decided to eagerly toss themselves into 18 other countries too, including the UK, each with different interpretations of what rights their citizens are entitled too.
Their Dubai office is especially spicy, considering that countries stance regarding woman and LGBT rights.
It seems to me concerns regarding censorhips are all gone. Now we have everyone at every level of internet banning people left and right. From DNS provider, hosting, name servers, to social media, youtube, to even blogs.
103 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadI mean, it's a banal and boring law, but his use of Twitter was always a clear violation of the Presidential Records Act. They couldn't have set up a dumb finger server or something and written him a junky app, then mirrored it to FB/Twitter/Parler whatever?
I dont think they even have the ability to talk to anyone who could make that into a twitter bot.
Could we have been more diligent in educating people on ways of debating and understanding, could we have built a society that is not obsessed with perfection and winning?
If it wasn't Twitter, Facebook, Google etc. it would simply be something else in their place who had to perform the job of the gatekeeper. We were on course to enabling global communication at an unprecedented scale regardless of these companies establishing themselves, it wasn't news that we'd get here. Did we just discount the discourse on this that it's 'suddenly' a concern?
Decentralization, encryption and anonymity is the only way to deal with this.
Aether is a good first draft: multi part app with a back end that can live on a single board computer in your closet and costs $4 to run for a year and a front end that you can use on your phone.
Be prepared that it's a distributed system, it takes a while for posts to show up when you first run it.
Incidentally I absolutely love it when conservatives advocate for more government, whatever happened to the market is perfect let it decide the winners and losers.
Or they can choose to moderate and/or editorialize the content they host and the conversations that happen on their platform AND be held responsible for it.
I'm not saying it is bad that a company moderates their platform, please do it! But don't pretend everyone can voice their view on their platform and be clear and forward about what you are doing.
The government is one small part of the State (as an organization). I should have probably said "Let the legislative and judiciary powers of the State handle it".
>whatever happened to the market is perfect let it decide the winners and losers
This is already happening: some people, disillusioned by the service Twitter provides, are moving to Parlor, for example.
In the end Twitter have the power to ban Trump from their platform the same way a bar owner can ban people who they don’t like. Just because everyone thinks and feels Twitter is a public forum does not make it one; it is private property like virtually everything on the Internet.
Why Twitter posts if not punishment of children? Are children that unimportant to this society?
Him: I would much rather we have A so that we didn't need B
You: Or, we could have this thing B
I know I'm on the record as saying that rationality, which is to say empirical philosophy, is incomplete. Let me clarify that by saying that it isn't the same thing as rejecting it outright anymore than rejecting Newtonian mechanics outright is the same thing as admitting it is incomplete.
That anyone can believe that simply "letting them be wrong on the internet" is a viable course of action at this point is utterly baffling.
I sincerely hope there is an alternative to totalitarian control of public discourse, but I am becoming increasingly worried that there is not.
"Warning: This site contains highly speculative & offensive gossip and might cause anxiety, stress, unattainable standards and lowered self-esteem. Information on this site should not be considered credible, and might cause radicalization and extremism."
Jesus Christ man. You think you can educate the population to the point they don’t believe conspiracies and “fake news”?
I mean, how many anti-vaxers are postgraduates?
You’re absolutely nuts if you think you can “fix” the human condition through education.
As for your very specific example, the arguments post-graduate anti-vaxxers will make are going to be different than people who're mislead and aggravated by 600-word articles or even shorter chain messages spreading bullshit. The vaccine to this bullshit is education, believe it or not.
Humans are instinctively divisive. Our species relied heavily on small communities working together and excluding other communities throughout our entire human history. Tribalism is engrained in our nature as a direct effect of our evolution. It would take another thousand years to unlearn that. Social media is a global tool, and therefore social media has just brought out the worst in humans on a global level, but it hasn't created that intrinsic tribal instinct in us to begin with. Humans are just not meant to cooperate on such a large scale. We'd all be much better off (aka leaving more harmonious) if we'd live in smaller communities and would revert a lot of what globalisation has given us.
For these big companies I think governments gave them the choice to censor or be broken up, so they chose censorship. Now the governments are wanting more regulation.
I don't know how they all are responding but could Facebook be handling this dilemma better than Twitter, or would Facebook also be under their sights? How could Amazon etc be targeted?
If they be a publisher, they may take editorial control but the also become liable for anything that escaped their control and can no longer claim “The views expressed here are not our own.”.
In the alternative, they can be a platform, and may not take editorial control and only be required and allowed to remove content they are legally required to remove.
The current situation is that they want their cake and eat it too.
Any platform that tries to do this will quickly fill up with spam.
They're permitted to implement restrictions on that only humans and not bots may post, not on content, provided that it be legal.
8chan had a system where one had to solve a captcha every day and where one was not permitted to post more than one message per minute.
EDIT: minorities still have a chance in two ways: (1) they can have discussion groups which can be large but still limited (2) the majority will have some tolerance and thus will only suppress the ideas of minorities if they find them objectionable.
Well, the entire point is that free speech is not the same as broadcasting rights. You can still have free speech. You just don't get a "free platform".
Minorities can still have discussion groups. It's just that their ideas never achieve mass broadcasting if the majority finds those ideas objectionable.
“You still have freedom of speech, but can only talk about subjects I approve of”.
No, it is:
“You still have freedom of speech, but not a free platform”.
To do this is to revisit some of the worst days of the 20th century. I am astonished that views like this are getting more popular. Have we learned nothing from history?
In all seriousness, what do you think will be the eventual outcome when you marginalise people this way? Don't just reply to me here. Go and do some real reading.
Democracy is violently (under threat or by direct action) imposing the will of majority on a minority.
The reason I think this is because of the USA: the USA started as a minarchy, it became very rich (probably because of it) and then slowly became the largest, fattest government ever.
Similarly, tons of smaller governments in EU keep growing larger and more inefficient instead of cutting down and freeing the economy.
Ironically, it leads to the exact opposite, where certain minorities express disproportionate power. For example, the rules always favor the status quo, so a minority in power can retain power, and subvert even largish majorities from passing rules they favor.
Democracy may well be the least worst form of government, but it's even worse than I think most people give it credit for. The assumption is that at least half the people are happy with at least half of the results, and it doesn't even guarantee that much.
I think you're conflating democracy in general with social democracies.
Social democracies are much more complicated - but they have a corruptible government which pretty much guarantees that the richest minority will be able to get laws that appear to satisfy everyone while benefiting them.
A clear example is progressive taxation - it sounds fair to a laymen. Then you see that all the rich people use tax loopholes to pay close to zero while middle class people struggle to get rich because of the extra tax hurdle.
I think the situation is slightly better in Switzerland because it's a semi-direct democracy and the greater use of referendums gives the population a greater chance to shape their society.
In times gone by, that would have prevented people spreading information about the world being a sphere and orbiting the sun. The flat earthers and proponents of the earth being the centre of the universe would have suppressed Copernicus' and Kepler's discoveries of heliocentrism and elliptical orbits.
New ideas displace old ideas all the time, and that displacement can only occur if there is both a rational evidence-based reason for displacing it and there is the opportunity to do so. To suppress an idea is to remove opportunity for discussion and to entrench the established viewpoint irrespective of its merits. It's the very antithesis of modern liberal thought.
Suppression of ideas also conversely prevents the objective discussion of bad ideas and dismissing them. Too much conversation in the present days is not grounded in objectivity, and this lets bad ideas fester. Open and fair minded discussion is a basic requirement for living in a free society.
There is a disturbing tendency to wish to suppress discussion of "sensitive" or "controversial" topics in recent years. That is a path which will lead to tyranny. Because it boils down to other people telling us what we are and are not allowed to say, think and do. This would not be a fair or free society.
Having groups "approve" information means having gatekeepers who wield a lot of power. Censors. Who is to ensure that they exercise that power both fairly and accurately? It opens a huge can of worms. It might seem to make sense for "obviously" black and white issues. But most are not so clear cut, and choosing a "correct" side is impossible.
"False information" isn't countered by suppression. It's countered with facts and open discussion.
I absolutely agree that the current state of affairs with social media is problematic. That's the reason I quit all of them and deleted my accounts permanently. But what you're advocating still amounts to censorship and a failure to treat individuals as capable of evidence-based rational thought, and is still the antithesis of what we want in an open and free society.
You can choose the moderators at random. This would be somewhat akin to the idea of sortition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
But, more importantly, people like to spread what they want to believe, even if it's not true. Trump really played into that: He started by promoting the birther theory, which people who didn't like Obama chose to believe. Finally, he promoted the theory that there was widespread election fraud, even though it was thoroughly disproven. Again, people chose to believe Trump's lie even though it was thoroughly disproven.
IMO, we need to strengthen our slander laws, and have a higher "burden of truth" on our media companies. Specifically, if a media company covers provenly false information in a way that implies it is, or could be, true, that media company needs to be prosecuted for slander, or worse.
But, more importantly, we need to prosecute elected officials who contradict fact; and ban candidates who brazenly contradict established fact.
Even today, there are teachers who spout that homosexuality is somehow a bad thing.
Controversial topics will take time to reach mainstream agreement, no matter how you shape the spread of information. The question is how to do it in a way such that society is not disrupted by a strong opinion.
In any case, regardless of who you are, if you violate the terms of service of platform, you can be terminated on that platform.
The platform makes the rules, within the context of the legal systems with which it is governed by. When it comes to "free speech", that is a very tricky subject. More significantly, if even the local population cannot agree on whether certain speech should be allowed or not, then the government has no hope of regulating it either.
Nothing in terms of his day job but he is known as a fan of technology (not a particularly well-informed one) so he’s likely to have an opinion on the matter. More to the point, though, the government usually nominate a minister to go round all the Sunday morning political TV shows and answer questions on whatever is in the news.
He was being interviewed on a general politics show
>> Mr Hancock, a former culture secretary, told BBC One's Andrew Marr Show
It's usual on these shows for the interviewer to treat the the politician as a representative of the wider government and to ask general questions as well as those about the politician's own area of responsibility.
Minor nit, but he's not UK health secretary. Health is devolved so he only has responsibility for England.
A corollary of this is that when any Cabinet minister speaks publicly, they speak on behalf of the government, and they are expected to be able to respond to general media enquiries on matters outside their specific role. They may choose not to respond substantially or to refer the enquiry to a colleague more familiar with the details, and they very often do. If they don't, it is almost certain that they are expressing an agreed Cabinet position and they just happen to be the minister doing the media rounds that day.
Still, I fear they will just accept being publishers and deal with regulations while still being considered impartial platforms by the public.
"Step by step, private companies incorporate state businesses; even the most stubborn vestige of the old work of governing (for example, that activity which is supposed to secure private parties against other private parties) will ultimately be taken care of by private contractors..."
On the other hand, these platforms have amplified voices that would otherwise not even attain local coverage. Being coldly objective, they also make it possible for State Actors to punch way, way above their weight in an information warfare perspective (see Russia).
It's also very important to remember that social media and modern 24 hour WWF-style "Journalism" WOULD NOT EXIST without near constant levels of conflict content to drive engagement. So there are entire very large business domains where there is existential threat were there to be regulation of content.
Net-net, the best possible outcome of all of this would be the demise of platforms like FB, Twitter, FoxNews, CNN, BBC, et. al as they really only serve to rapidly diminish the IQ's of the electorate/culture.... Of course that won't happen because culturally we are beyond weak and have long since surrendered our future to a small group of people with the wealth to supersede most if not all Government controls (including the UK of course, I mean do you really think Boris Johnson has the stones for doing anything other than running his pie-hole like Trump has for the last 4 years??).
It's due to the unbelievable amount of manipulative statements and outright lies (e.g. many of the statements made by the current UK government and the "Brexiteers" - not just Trump) that this is even an issue.
A platform labelling or blocking repeated offenders seems sensible to me - however I do think the rules they are enforcing should be fair and equally applied.
He'll say whatever he thinks is popular at the time.
Here he is calling for tighter regulation of social media: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/internet-laws...
> New laws will be introduced aimed at tackling the internet “wild west” and making Britain the “safest place in the world” to be online, the culture secretary has said.
> The largest social media companies could be fined billions of pounds if they do not take steps to protect users, Matt Hancock warned.
> A new code of practice to tackle online bullying, stricter age verification requirements, and a regular internet safety transparency report to keep tabs on online abuse could also be included in new legislation.
> Measures to tackle online harm could be funded through an industry-wide levy on firms such Facebook and Twitter.
This is how we get conflicting positions, such as "we value security and want the UK to be the safest place in the world to be online", but also "we want our police and security services to be able to access any online communications".
The handling of social media has often been similar. Apparently we are a democracy that values free speech, yet we also want the social media companies to use unspecified technology that they are assumed to have available to identify and block harmful content, for whatever definition of "harmful" is politically convenient at the time.
A recurring theme is being seen to object to negative consequences of modern technology but without ever taking a clear stance or positive action for which they could be held responsible if it has other negative consequences of its own. It's the epitome of trying to have a cake and eat it, instead dumping the hard questions on the big tech firms. Those firms make good targets politically because obviously they do have some real problems, so a lot of people will be fine with blaming them for the evils of the tech world and won't have much sympathy for anything bad that happens to them.
I would hardly say that this counts as free time, and I would argue keeping up with the news is the job of a government minister.
I never understood why my own government seems to feel the need to jump on every social medium out there. It gives those legacy, leverage and goes against many years of tradition.
Social spaces and infrastructure should be regulated so that they can be shielded from social justice and the government regarding user generated content.
No one will boycott twitter if they know twitter can't just press a button to ban. No one will ask for demonetization of a YouTube channel if they know that has to come from the legal system. Or pressure companies buying ads that show on channels you don't like
What is your comment even saying?
Don't dogwhistle please, write what you really mean.
Last I checked I publish a blog site and I did not get the necessary permission from Chinese authorities to do so... and I don’t care, I have no link to China.
The UK has regulations that companies have to follow to serve UK citizens.
It’s not that strange and is quite common.
The EU's strategy with the GDPR, in attempting to make it viral so that businesses it could reach within its own jurisdiction could be penalised if they dealt with businesses it couldn't reach elsewhere, is a dangerous path to be following. Taken to its logical conclusion, this kind of strategy becomes a significant barrier to international trade and can leave businesses in impossible positions.
A better way to address these issues is for governments to make proper international agreements with each other on matters where they agree on the principles, so that businesses in any state that is party to those agreements know what the rules are, and the rules are consistent and enforceable throughout the states making the agreement.
Without such agreements, one would hope that governments of states that have not implemented some rule would protect their own businesses, including actively intervening to support those businesses if they were being "leaned on" to enforce the rules of other states extra-territorially. We really don't want a world where any sufficiently large political power -- the US, EU, China, India, whoever -- can unilaterally set rules that apply to everyone else as well.
Here in recent memory is the UK dealing with elected politicians who were silenced by force of law: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/4409447.stm
(mind you, they were also members of a terrorist organisation, so all the arguments about promoting violence apply ...)
For example, they are able to breach legal injunctions against publication, in such a way that a report of the breach can then be legally published.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-parliaments-46071159
It’s a little weird he tries to characterize Twitter exercising their ability to choose who has a voice on their platform as a new thing. That’s not new. They’ve been doing this all along.
If you only promote free speech in defense of authoritarian sedition, you aren’t promoting free speech. You’re promoting authoritarian sedition.
Their Dubai office is especially spicy, considering that countries stance regarding woman and LGBT rights.